The Paper Garden - Molly Peacock

This book had been on my list for so long that I had forgotten what it was, or why I put it on there.  A few weeks ago I googled the title (which was the only thing I had written) and then got the book from the library.  As soon as I saw the cover I was reminded of the numerous times I had picked it up and read the jacket during long hours at my previous job; remembered how much I had wanted to read it.

I felt like it took me forever to read; I must have carried this book around for over a week, dragging it from place to place and cracking it open whenever I had a chance. It's not that it's particularly long, but I was reading in short bursts and would stop for a day or so from time to time.  I was also showing it to everyone who came near me because each chapter is preceded by a beautiful colour plate of a bright flower against a back blackground - I would push the flower under people's noses, wait for them to oooh and ahhh, tell them, 'that's made out of paper' and get a kick out of their amazement.

This is really an amazing story.  Mostly biography, part memoir, it follows the life of Mary Delany, a minor aristocrat living in 1700s England.  She had an extraordinary and long life packed with the triumphs and tragedies that make up our years.  In her case, they are all the more interesting because of her class and location in time.  She was essentially sold at the age of 17 to an alcoholic 60-year old, horrific, to be sure, but luckily he died a few years later and she found herself at 23 to finally be able to live in her own skin and have more freedom in terms of choosing how to live her life.  Luckily that life, for the most part, had steady upswings and it seems she found many years of happiness. It was only in her final years, her early 70s, that she began a project that would give her lasting fame in the art world and beyond - she began making collages of paper flowers.

The biographer, Ms Peacock, became entranced by these collages and over time came to ask herself the question, how was Ms Delany able to make them?  Not strictly in the literal sense, of what kind of paper did she use, or paint, or where did she get the glue....but what drove her to the creation of these remarkable flowers, so unlike anything else that exists?  The authour's quest for an answer led her through years of correspondence and research, and enabled her to tell this story of Mary Delany's life.

I love biographies, and have particularly enjoyed reading those of women who managed to break ground in their relatively restrictive time periods.  I thoroughly enjoyed this book and was entranced by this woman's life, courage, resilience and capacity for love.  Her art is in every way a reflection of her personal story, and it's beauty all the more astounding for it's composition.

My only dislike about this book was the way the authour wove her own story into that of her subject's.  Some of the connections she made between her own life and Ms Delany's felt contrived, and it reads almost like she is speaking up out of turn.  I see why she wanted to illustrate why she became so interested in Mary Delany, but her story could have been summarized into an afterword or chapter at the end of the book in order to let the main story shine clearer.  Her writing is engrossing and poetic (of course, she's a poet) but I definitely felt that it would do more justice to the main story of Delany's life if bits of the authour's semi-memoir weren't interspersed throughout like jutting rocks.

Still, it is testament to the strength and power of the story of Mary Delany's life that I would still love to own this book despite everything I just said above.  I would also love, love love to have some prints of her flowers to put up in my apartment. My favorite were the roses; they match my tattoo.